Many aspects of a person's personal and business life depend on the availability of information from many sources. Indeed, the decisions that are made in a person's day-to-day life depend in a large part on the information that is not only available, but that which is actually received and considered by the individual. It can be appreciated that information that is available may nonetheless not be received or considered if the availability thereof is not sufficiently convenient. For example, libraries include thousands of sources of information, but the accessibility thereof is somewhat inconvenient, in that people must actually go to the libraries, look through the various indices of the authors, subject matter, etc., and then actually find the publication and study the same. The current use of the Internet and the associated mass of information has been widely accepted and used, primarily because of its ease of accessibility.
As noted above, the effectiveness of information depends on the speed, efficiency and reliability thereof. Timely accessibility and delivery increases the value of the information. An important technology that is widely used to facilitate the speed and delivery of the information, especially documents, is the facsimile (fax) mode of transmission. Fax delivery systems of the type that provide documentary information are available in two general categories. First, "fax broadcast" systems are utilized for delivering the same document at the information provider's request to a number of recipients at approximately the same period of time. On the other hand, "fax-on-demand" systems are available where an information provider places documents on a system and recipients can make telephone calls to request the desired documents. Both such systems are generally successful, but have serious deficiencies and limitations. The fax broadcast system is inefficient because it transmits all documents to all recipients identified on a list, regardless of whether the recipients are actually interested in the contents of the documents. Also, serious concerns remain with respect to the fax broadcast system in that the transmittal of unsolicited facsimile documents may violate various governmental rules and regulations.
A major shortcoming of the fax-on-demand system is its inefficiency, in that it requires a request of the information each time the recipient desires such information. Moreover, the recipient has no way of knowing when the information source has been changed, modified or even deleted.
The deficiencies of both the fax broadcast and fax-on-demand systems can be appreciated from the following example.
A hypothetical document distribution system is provided by the Center for Disease Control. The system satisfies a need to distribute a wide variety of warnings, notices and memoranda about diseases, viruses, diagnoses, treatments, medicines, etc., by fax to a large target group of doctors and technicians. The documents can be distributed by either the traditional fax broadcast technique, or the fax-on-demand technique. In view that there can be tens of thousands of medical facilities included in the target group, there exists many documents that are not relevant to each of the facilities. As such, the fax broadcast technique is inefficient and very expensive. On the other hand, the fax-on-demand technique is impractical because the recipients have no way of knowing when new information becomes available, in view that the number of documents available is extremely large.
From the foregoing, it can be seen that a need exists for a new document distribution technique that is more efficient as to the distribution system, as well as the recipient. Another need exists for a new information distribution technique that allows recipients to receive only the information to which an interest exists, and automatically receive such information in a timely manner. Yet another need exists for an information distribution technique which allows recipients the capability to easily change or modify document requests such that new subject matters are easily added, and that the distribution of current subject matters are easily discontinued.